Homicides in Chicago, 1965-1995

These datasets contain information on every homicide in the
murder analysis files of the Chicago Police Department for the years
1965-1995. For the victim-level file, Part 1, data are provided on the
relationship of victim to offender, whether the victim or offender had
previously committed a violent or nonviolent offense, time of
occurrence and place of homicide, type of weapon used, cause and
motivation for the incident, whether the incident involved drugs,
alcohol, gangs, child abuse, or a domestic relationship, if or how the
offender was identified, and information on the death of the
offender(s). Demographic variables such as the age, sex, and race of
each victim and offender are also provided. The victim-level file
contains one record for each victim. Information for up to five
offenders is included on each victim record. The same offender
information is duplicated depending on the number of victims. For
example, if a sole offender is responsible for five victims, the file
contains five victim records with the offender's information repeated
on each record. Part 2, Offender-Level Data, is provided to allow the
creation of offender rates and risk analysis that could not be
accurately prepared using the victim-level file due to the repeating
of the offender information on each victim record. Offender variables
were reorganized during the creation of the offender file so that each
known offender is associated with a single record. A majority of the
variables in the offender-level file are replicas of variables in the
victim-level file. The offender records contain demographic
information about the offender, demographic and relationship
information about the offender's first victim (or sole victim if there
was only one), and information about the homicide incident.
Information pertaining to the homicide incident such as location,
weapon, or drug use are the same as in the victim-level file. In cases
where the offender data were completely missing in the victim-level
data, no offender records were generated in the offender-level
file. The offender-level data do not contain information about the
victims in these cases. Geographic variables in both files include the
census tract, community area, police district, and police area.